Lottocracy

Democracy is in trouble--there is disagreement about what is going wrong and what we should do about it. Lottocracy argues that, perhaps surprisingly, the problem is with the heart of modern democracy: the election. Elections are failing as accountability mechanisms. Elections provide powerful short-term incentives, leading elected politicians to downplay long-term catastrophic concerns. Elections create divisions where none need exist. The most powerful among us take advantage of this to control who is elected, what policies are enacted, and which problems are ignored. Policy complexity, citizen ignorance, elite capture and manipulation, algorithmically reinforced echo chambers, intensifying partisan division and distrust, and the dissolution of political community combine to render modern electoral democracies incapable of helping us solve the urgent problems we face. What should we do?Alexander Guerrero takes seriously the possibility that although electoral democracy has been bette